Focus on Women: Women on the Move

Back to Focus on Women: Women on the Move page

WNC Luminary: "Julie Parker and Sandi Tomlin-Sutker of WNC Woman Magazine" by Annelinde Matzner

Annelinde Metzner

Part of a series. Read the rest of the series here.

Sheville.org is pleased to begin this new feature with Linda Metzner's interview of Sandi Tomlin-Sutker and Julie Parker, founders of the magazine WNC Woman in 2002. The vision of WNC Woman is to publish profiles, prose, poetry, artwork, and photos that celebrate the strength, wisdom, and grace of women in our region from every walk of life and every economic and educational level.

Linda: The magazine you founded in 2002, WNC Woman , has done a great service for the women of our region, highlighting our accomplishments, our art, our humor, and our concerns. What was the inspiration that got you started?

Julie: Divine!

Sandi: Ha-ha! Divine inspiration, that's right!

Julie: Actually, I'm really not kidding. We just fell into it backwards. I was having lunch with a friend at the Sunnyside Cafe, and she said, “I think you ought to do a magazine for women in western North Carolina.” And I thought a moment and I said, “OK,” having no background, no money.

Linda: No previous experience.

Julie: No previous experience required.

Sandi: Then she called me up.

Julie: I called Sandi. When I had done her website for the Natural Home a couple years before, we'd gotten along so well, and our esthetic was so similar.

Sandi: For example she would say, “Put that about an inch over to the right,” and I would say, “I was just going to say the same thing.”

Julie: We'd both say “Yes!” at the same time. It would be just exactly the right thing. So we got the idea to publish something together one day. No idea of a print magazine. We were thinking more of an e-book about something.

Linda: Thinking of a one-time thing?

Julie: Well, no, maybe several e-books, but an e-book was what we had in our mind, because we were working on web stuff. We just kind of put that idea aside. We just figured that in the fullness of time it would arise itself. So when I called Sandi - you tell that part.

Sandi: Well, I still had the Natural Home and had not thought about selling it or anything. She called me and said, “Do you want to do a magazine, a women's magazine, for WNC?” and I said, “Yeah!” It was just like that, and I didn't think about it. “Yeah!” It was definitely divine inspiration.

Linda: That brings me to another question. Is there something about your relationship that made you work together so well, a complementarity or something like that?

Julie: It's a strange and wonderful relationship (laughter).

Linda: That's a good quote.

Julie: She's strange and I'm wonderful.

Sandi: No, it's the other way around. You're wrong there (more laughter).

Julie: Well, we did have an almost identical esthetic, and, thank heavens, we're not identical in our approach to things, or you might as well have just one person.

Sandi: I think we had very complimentary backgrounds and skills. Julie's area was graphic design and visual stuff, and my background was in business and research, that sort of thing. I'd gone to grad school in political science and really, really loved doing research and loved writing, and I'd been a writer all my life. You know, journals and stuff like that. But I brought the business part too - that's what I had been doing for twenty years. So that has been a major part of making it work. We bring that esthetic which is very similar. We're not arguing over, “I don't like that.” It doesn't happen very often.

Julie: And when it does, I'm right.

Sandi: No, no, she's wrong. But when it does happen, I think our vision is so similar, we can come to a middle ground, a place that works fairly quickly. And there's not a lot of ego that gets in there like “No, I want to do it my way.” We have different sets of skills. If we were both artists and graphic designers, I think we might have a problem. I feel like I'm learning those things, and I know I have a really good eye for it. I love it, but that's not my background.

Julie: However, Sandi is stepping into the right-brain part. This month's cover is based on her photograph. The manipulation of it, the playing with it, is hers. For years we've decided on the image together, pretty much. We sit down and decide on the colors and everything about the cover together. And that's fun.

Linda: Was there something special about the women of this region that inspired you, that fed you ideas?

Julie: Many of the women of this area, because of the nature of the economy here, are forced to, or choose to, or are delighted to create their own way of making a living. I feel that there are an unusual number of women doing that now.

Sandi: I've been in the retail business with Native Expressions and then Natural Home, and so I knew a lot of people in a peripheral way as they came in the store and shopped with me over the years. We'd been in Asheville since 1979, and so I had a really strong feeling for the community of women. That's why I love it here. We'd moved away from here for a little while for me to go to grad school in Chapel Hill and then came back. Couldn't wait to get back. I feel like this is unusual - so many women here who are very educated, who are intellectually curious, who are spiritually oriented, spiritually curious, but in a very broad range of types of things. As we started talking about the magazine, talking with other women, there was just this immediate response, “We need something like that here!” That stimulated us to think even more deeply about what it would be. I feel like that intellectual curiosity and the spiritual curiosity that's all throughout this region was what's inspired me. And Julie too.

Julie: And I think that so many women have come to a point in their lives where they're setting their own course. They're not just swallowing what they've been told or what society says.

Sandi: Women like that tend to move here. We all know of the cliché, “I was just led to move to Asheville; I just had to go,” and I think there is something about the area that does draw people. And then once you've got a community here of like-minded people, that draws more and more people like that to the area.

Linda: Was there something about our region itself that inspired you?

Sandi: I think it's the very thing that draws people here. I'm very oriented toward the earth, toward gardening, and walkin' barefoot on the land, that sort of thing, and I think that's so much of why people are here, from the time of the Cherokee to the first Scots-Irish people coming in, and then all the different influxes. It's really not just the visual beauty of the mountains, but something inherent in the place, just a real deep spirit that's in the place. And I think that's part of what draws people here - they don't even know what it is.

Linda: They don't know yet.

Sandi: Yeah, exactly. When I think about the people who have written for us and the kinds of articles that we get, there's just a depth of experience that people bring that's tied into the place itself.

Julie: And we do have, once a year, an issue called “The Spirit of Place.”

Linda: My favorite issue.

Sandi: Yeah, me too. And I think that that's the other part - that we have wanted, and have made efforts, and have succeeded at consistently focusing on local women. Julie lives in a part of Madison County and my husband Sam and I live in another part of Madison County. The women who have been there their whole lives just have that depth and a lot to offer, and we really wanted to be sure to focus on those women too, not just the newcomers but the women that are really tied to the land.

Julie: Overall we are not impressed with celebrity “expertism” I guess is the word! It's not our emphasis.

Sandi: We'd love to have an interview with Maya Angelou, but not at the expense of the woman who works at a local cafe in Mars Hill where we often have breakfast. And that's, to us, equally as interesting an article.

Julie: We don't see the leaders in the community as being any more of value than the woman who says, “And would you like fries with that?” We feel all women have an innate wisdom. Hence our tag line, “celebrating the strength, wisdom and grace of women.” That's one reason why we are 99.999% local authors. It's a rare occasion we have someone from outside the area. That would be something really unusual. We emphasize that wisdom, knowledge, know-how, is not out there. It's here, and furthermore, it's not just here, as in, local women leaders, it's here (pointing to heart) within ourselves.

Linda: Yeah, women cope brilliantly with their environment, wherever they are.

Sandi: Absolutely. That's a good point too. I think another thing I certainly want to mention is that from the beginning, our focus has been about solutions to things, not about focusing on problems. We all know that there are problems. Women don't make as much money as men at the same job; women are largely the people who get raped; there are tons and tons [of problems]. But we've chosen very consciously not to focus on that, ‘cause we all already know it. Instead, we talk about how women, like you say, cope brilliantly, how women deal with the issues in their lives, and what they do to make their lives better, their family's lives better, and the community's lives better. That's really important to us, to continue to focus on how to live a good life!

Linda: Has the publication taken any unforeseen turns in the past three years? Things that surprise you?

Julie: I would say that the publication sprang fully formed like Venus from the foam! It wasn't like we sat down and said, “Well, should we do this or do that?” Although we did, but the thing was “whoosh!” Like that. And the plans have been pretty much “whoosh!” We always reevaluate. We always see where we are, where we need to go, where we need to focus. But from the beginning, we thought of having workshops and a conference, and that's underway.

Sandi: I don't feel like there have been surprises. It's not like we've planned everything to a T. But there is organic process that we're a part of, and I think we're both good planners. Right now we've got new direction. We've been saying, “OK, what's our next level of growth? What's our next direction?” We had a good business plan at the beginning: how many copies we were going to print, how it was going to be distributed, how it was going to be done, and that's all evolved along the way. I'm not saying we had a perfect handle on everything. That's certainly not the case, but it feels like the idea of it was there as it formed in that first couple of months. We had a lot of focus groups of women come to Julie's house and sit around and talk once a month, and we'd bring magazines in and just talk - “Do you want this? What do you think about that? Is this a good size? How many pages?” - those kinds of things. “What do you want to see in the magazine?” It just had this organic growth.

Linda: This was for the first year or so?

Julie: This was in the first few months. And to show you how fully formed it was, when my friend suggested, “I think you should do a magazine,” that was on June 20th. On November 1st, we were on the stands. Which means we formed a corporation, we made a board, we learned software, we learned layout, we learned distribution, we learned about the printer - everything that you had to do, we did it in four months and ten days.

Linda: I just love that “Venus from the foam” image. Do you see WNC Woman changing in the future? And if so, what new directions do you see her taking?

Sandi: I wouldn't use the word “change,” because that implies that you'd do something quite different, and I don't think we are. But it's going to grow. I know it's going to grow. It's growing. We're going to be consistently adding to our distribution every month, adding to our pages. We're selling more ads. We finally got a really good group of women selling ads for us. And that's what we needed. That's where the revenue all comes from. Our next big step is to go to what's called “stitch and trim,” where the excess edges are trimmed off and the pages are stapled together. It will have a glossy cover that's just gorgeous. It's going to improve the quality, the look of the magazine. The content's going to stay as good as it always has been and, hopefully, will continue to get better and better.

Linda: How can the women of our community help WNC Woman to survive and thrive and get whatever you need?

Sandi: Well, I think there are a couple things that come up for me right away. Our source of revenue is advertising. The magazine is put out free, 14,000 copies every month, all around the region. Businesses or services can advertise with us and urge their friends who have businesses to advertise because this is a great venue for that. It's a win-win for the advertiser as well. And the other is women who write. Just keep sending us the great material that we're getting. That's very important.

Julie: If you want a win-win-win, suppose you don't have a business, or advertising doesn't mesh with your business, or you're an employee. Consider supporting a local nonprofit by advertising their events with us. For example, Our Voice or Helpmate.

Linda: How much time do they need in advance to advertise their events with you?

Sandi: A month. The deadline is the twelfth. You'd help support the magazine and help support, for example, Our Voice. Another thing - many women mail the magazine off to women friends around the country. We don't mind! But consider getting them a subscription or encourage them to get their own subscription. That would help a lot. We used to have something called an “unsubscription.” People would send us the amount they valued the magazine, and we promised not to mail them a copy. They could still go pick it up for free! I think our biggest “unsubscription” was a hundred dollars. They realized they get this rich, rich resource absolutely free every month, and so they wanted to support it.

Linda: Well, it's been an honor and a privilege to hear the background and the thought behind WNC Woman . Thank you very much.